CGMS | Methods Workshop with Amy Liu | Surveying Non-English Speakers Among Asian Americans
CGMS | Methods Workshop with Amy Liu | Surveying Non-English Speakers Among Asian Americans
Amy Liu (UT Austin), a leading researcher of language and politics using surveys and statistical analysis methods, tackles the challenges of conducting surveys of non-English speakers. Building on her pioneering surveys of ethnic Chinese and immigrants in Europe and Southeast Asia, Dr. Liu is pursuing quantitative research among the Asian American community, 25% of whom do not speak English (well) and are consistently under-sampled in existing surveys. For example, less than 2% of the Asian respondents in the Collaborative Multi-racial Post-election Survey (CMPS) took the survey in an Asian language. Dr. Liu observes that because linguistic proficiency is not randomly distributed, research on Asian Americans is systematically biased against those with Limited English Proficiency (LEP). In this workshop, she presents an alternative data collection approach (N=4956) that yielded a much larger sample of non-English speakers (27.7%) – an approach that also considers (1) the diversity of ancestral origins for the respondents and (2) the financial resources available to the researchers.
Please join the Center for Global Migration Studies in hosting Dr. Amy Liu for this methods workshop. Dr. Janelle Wong (UMD) will comment.
Dr. Liu's recent publications include Ethnicity and Politics in Southeast Asia (Cambridge 2022) with Jacob I. Ricks and The Language of Political Incorporation: Chinese Migrants in Europe (Temple 2021).